Last night, driving home from a jolly 60th birthday bash, with my partner, Chris in the front, daughter Martha and son-in-law Ben (in wigs) in the back, I was stopped and breathalysed for the first time in my life.

Martha and Ben had been to see West Side Story (not in wigs) before coming on to the party and we’d been roaring through the hits as we drove home. Martha had just done a sotto voce solo (’say it soft and it’s almost like praying’) and, as I swerved round a roundabout, we all slammed in to Maria, Maria  at the tops of our voices. Then I noticed  the siren and the blue light behind us and stopped.

Now, here’s the thing. I was pretty confident that one glass of wine a few hours ago wouldn’t have put me over the limit, but when asked by the officer, I started to doubt my memory. I answered confidently and continued to act cheery- I may even have given them a snatch of song in the back of the car as they prepared the machine.

But my mind was reeling. The sequence of events became blurry. Had I inadvertantly had more than that? Ben had handed me a top-up not long before we left – what had happened to it?

I failed the first blow and my head filled with alarm bells. They did explain that I just hadn’t blown for long enough and had to do it again. At that point I lost all memory of the hours before. Though I kept up a confident, compliant but possibly inane front, I had started to panic. Then to think that I was acting a little too cheery for a someone so allegedly sober in the face of authority, thus drawing suspicion. I kept trying to remember the radio programme I’d heard recently about units and how-much and that almost all of us have very little idea of what a unit is.

I notched up a 6 – the limit being 35 – so all was well and I was let out of the car, vindicated. My memory snapped back into clarity. Once again I knew without doubt that I hadn’t spent the evening necking glass after glass of alcohol.

Now, I tend to be calm and clear-headed in a crisis. I can stand my ground and I knew I was OK, really. Even so, I was thrown into doubt.  I think that anyone  can doubt themselves – maybe only for a second -as soon as doubt is cast by anyone else, particularly anyone in a position of power.

If I’d continued along the trajectory of doubt that my mind was on, could I have convinced myself that I was guilty?   Would clarity have returned if the doubt continued – or if accusations been made? Had I been bullied (which I wasn’t – the policemen were polite and  genial in that particular British-policeman-to-responsible-lady-citizen way throughout) I would have been even less certain of my ground. Perhaps in a less congenial atmosphere, facing an actual accusation, my mind would have sharpened up… or would it have just got woollier? 

I’ve only been accused of something serious, involving lawyers, once, which was truly horrible and frightening. Accused of something that you have to prove yourself innocent of is very hard. If you believe yourself to be even a tiny bit guilty, it lets doubt in, puts you on the back foot and weakens your defensive stance. (That never got to court, by the way).  

I know that even excellent witnesses in the law courts can be unreliable. Memory itself is unreliable – some things we notice and others we don’t.  Add that to what happens if, as in my breathalyser experience, you doubt your own memory when challenged, and even the possibility of accuracy looks slim.

 Most of us in this country don’t take notes on our lives just in case we have to defend ourselves later. How reliable can your memory and your certainty of innocence be, then, in the face of torture?  I can’t imagine. I just can’t imagine it.

Filed under: Uncategorized by Melanie